


Bifurcation

by AlchemyAlice



Category: Wanted (2008), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Disorder, Non-Chronological
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-26
Updated: 2011-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-23 02:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven knows pretty much everything about Charles. She knows how much milk he likes in his tea, what shops in Oxford he buys his clothes from, and which possessions he would run back into his flat to save if it were burning down. She knows about his fear of spiders, and his guilty impatience with uncouth behavior. She knows that he can be unbearably pompous, and unbearably kind.</p><p>She also, for better or worse, knows about Wesley.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bifurcation

**Author's Note:**

> Written as fulfillment of a combination of prompts from xmen_firstkink and 1stclass_kink.

The first thing Erik notices about Charles, after he’s gotten over the shock of there being someone, _anyone_ who is in any way like Erik himself, is that metal hums around him. Not in the way it sings to Erik, but in a respectful undertone, like there is recognition there, if nothing else.

“So. Mind reading,” he says slowly, as they climb out of the dingy and onto the coast guard’s boat. “Can you do anything else?”

Charles's eyes are wide and guileless. “Isn’t that enough?”

Erik blinks, and then shrugs. “I suppose it is.”

One can see how the confusion might start there.

***

Raven knows pretty much everything about Charles. She knows how much milk he likes in his tea, what shops in Oxford he buys his clothes from, and which possessions he would run back into his flat to save if it were burning down. She knows about his fear of spiders, and his guilty impatience with uncouth behavior. She knows that he can be unbearably pompous, and unbearably kind.

She also, for better or worse, knows about Wesley.

***

“That was a very impressive thing you did, with that chain.”

Erik turns sharply in the bunk the coast guard has put him in. Charles stands in the hatch, leaning against the frame of it and looking like a very professorial drowned rat.

He grunts in reply. _Didn’t get the job done, did it,_ he thinks bitterly, looking back down and lacing up a pair of borrowed shoes.

“Damn good start, though.”

“That,” Erik says, after a pause, “Is very unsettling.”

Charles dips his head in chastisement. “I apologize. I’m a bit knackered, and that means I can’t always tell whether you’re speaking aloud or not.”

Erik honestly can’t tell whether he’s lying, so he settles on saying, “That must be inconvenient.”

“That’s the problem with my gift, you see. Yours, you ask it to come alive, and it does. Mine just never turns off.”

Erik snorts, and Charles's gaze softens. “Ah. Not always for you, I see. I bet with some practice it could, though.”

“What do you mean?” Erik asks with a hint of warning, not bothering to again point out that Charles has apparently been in his head.

Charles puts up his hands. “I merely think that you are capable of a lot more than you think you are.”

“You think I haven’t tried?”

“I think,” Charles says, leaning forward, “That you’ve only been trying in one direction. If you’re interested, I could probably point you towards a few more.”

His incredible presumption is both irritating and intriguing. And so despite his misgivings, Erik stays.

***

The thing is, Charles doesn’t know about Wesley.

That makes it hard for Raven, a great deal of the time.

On the other hand, the fact that Charles _continues_ not to know? Is the best proof she has that Charles is keeping his promise to never read her. And that, honestly, is enough for her to go on with.

***

“Did you stay out here all night?”

“I don’t sleep much,” Charles says as the coast guard boat docks, smiling crookedly, his drying hair curling along his collar. Erik had found him out on deck after napping fitfully for the remainder of the night. “I’m afraid of what my brain might get up to without my permission.”

“Is it so unruly?” Erik says, with a raised eyebrow. He’s dressed in a borrowed uniform, ill-fitting, layered over with a heavy sweater that makes him feel like a child again, borrowing his father’s winter clothes.

“I dare say it is,” Charles replies lightly. “Raven’s had her complaints in the past, certainly.”

Erik wonders, even then, what it is precisely that Raven complains about.

***

Wesley appeared during Charles's first year at Oxford. At least, that was the first time Raven met him.

She went to meet Charles at his flat, and when he answered the door he looked at her in a way that she had never seen before. “Raven. We were going out tonight, weren’t we?” he said, after a strange pause.

She stepped back. “Charles?”

“Yeah, no.” He tapped his head, the gesture nervous and birdlike. “Not right now.” He looked at his watch. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta go. If he asks, you guys got shitfaced and had fun, that’s what you usually do, isn’t it? But I’ve got to take care of something, so I’ll catch you later. Or not, as the case may be.”

“Who are you?” she hissed, suddenly furious and adrenaline-filled; she started forward to push the door back. “What have you done with Charles?”

And then she froze as a gun suddenly was leveled at her face.

“I haven’t done anything to him, okay?” this person who wasn’t Charles said. “Fuck, he’s the one who—never mind. I don’t have time for this. Charles will be back when I’m finished with this job. In the meantime, get out of my way.”

And then he was shoving the gun into a holster at his back and striding out the door, pulling on a jacket Raven had never seen before to hide it.

Raven stumbled into the flat, and looked around. Everything looked exactly as it always did.

She made herself tea, spiked heavily with whiskey, and sat down to wait.

The next morning, when Charles asked with some confusion why he had bruises all up and down his left flank, she bit her lip, and told him he’d fallen over onto some cobblestones coming home.

“Good lord,” he said, laughing and embarrassed, “I probably ought to stop drinking.”

“That’s what you always say,” she replied, and forced a smile back at him.

***

The CIA facility feels a bit like a dorm, and a bit like a prison. Having only the latter for comparison, Erik makes his best attempt to leave with extreme malice.

Charles heads him off. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Erik stops, less because he’d been caught, more because Charles sounds rather different. Curious, he turns.

Charles stands at the entrance with his hands in his pockets, a strange, aggressive set to his shoulders. “This place holds no interest for me,” Erik says. “I’m going to find Shaw.”

“We can help with that. With more of us on your side, we can take him out.”

Charles sounds…American? Assured, not in the precocious way that he’d been on the boat, but like he had fought tooth and nail to earn his confidence.

“The CIA isn’t under your command, Charles,” Erik points out.

Charles smiles, a little crooked, a little manic. “Yet.”

And so again Erik stays, because Charles had, in the middle of the night, promised him retribution.

It takes a while for Erik to realize that Charles only remembers that promise some of the time.

***

The second time a stranger answered Charles's door in Oxford, Raven asked, “Where are you going?”

He laughed and scratched the back of his neck. “I’d tell you but, _et cetera, et cetera_.”

Raven shivered, and tried not to show it. “If you killed me, Charles would be very upset,” she said, forcing her voice steady.

Not-Charles paused. “So would I, honestly,” he said. “You’re…I remember you, too.”

She frowned. “Who _are_ you?” she asked again.

He regarded her, and said, “I’m Wesley Gibson. I’m what happened when your dear Charles went to Chicago for the summer.”

***

Charles had gone to Chicago to escape.

It had been the summer after Kurt had died and Cain had been sent away, and there had been nothing Charles wanted more than to run and never come back.

“I can come with you,” Raven had said, watching him pack. “I don’t like the idea of you being alone out there.”

“I won’t be,” Charles replied, throwing socks into his suitcase. “From what I understand, my father had contacts in the city. I’ve been in touch with a few of them, and they said they’d be happy to put me up.” He straightened, and looked at her. “Raven. You can stay at school for the holidays, hang out with your friends, like you wanted last summer.”

“Only three of them are even staying—”

“Then go home with one of the others—”

“What if I _shift_?”

“You won’t,” he held her shoulders. “You’ve got splendid control now, I know you can keep safe. I just. I have to get out of this house or I’ll go entirely mad.”

She cupped his cheek in her hand. “I know, I know you will. But why won’t you let me come with you?”

Charles looked at her, an uncomfortable mixture of regret and guilt and anxiety tightening around his mouth and eyes, and he just said, “Please, Raven.”

He hadn’t wanted to say it, she knows now. That he wanted to be on his own, didn’t want any reminder of this wasted old mansion and all of its memories, and that included her, if only for a short while. She hadn’t understood that at the time, and she’s rather glad of it now. She would have hated him for it.

In that moment, though, she’d simply quelled her confusion, and nodded.

Her friend Nancy had wanted her to come to Nantucket anyway.

***

After the near-disaster of Russia, and the very real disaster of the CIA facility, Charles looks tentatively between Erik and the children, and says, “I think I know a place we can go.”

Erik watches Raven’s face shift in recognition and trepidation. “Charles,” she says, “Are you sure you want to go back there?”

“Why ever not?” he asks, apparently with genuine confusion. Erik narrows his eyes.

“Bad memories, maybe?” Raven suggests tightly.

Charles seems unbothered. “Those memories are long buried,” he says. “Better that we make some new ones, yes?”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Erik hears her murmur.

He begins, very quietly, to have doubts.

***

When Charles returned from Chicago, he seemed lighter than he had in years.

Raven was there to meet him at the airport, and he came up and hugged her tightly before she even got a word out. “Raven,” he said into her hair, “It is wonderful to see you. I missed you terribly.”

“You too,” she said. He smelled like ink and old books, and also slightly of other things that she didn’t recognize.

Later, she learned that they were things like gun oil, lye, and medicinal wax.

***

The Westchester mansion is vast and strangely rambling, considering its quadrilateral outer foundations. Charles looks up at it along with the rest of the group and is somewhat surprised at how unfamiliar it seems to him.

“It seems smaller than I remember,” he comments.

Erik makes a guttural noise of disbelief. Raven punches Charles in the shoulder. “How about I give the grand tour?” she suggests.

“Please do,” Charles says, uncertain whether he’d actually be able to give it himself, anyway. His mental map of the place feels blurry, like its been covered over with layers of dust.

The building looks stranger and stranger, even as the others file inside.

***

“What happened in Chicago?” Raven asked quietly.

Wesley had returned seven hours after he’d given her his name, sporting bruised knuckles and a neutral expression. Raven insisted on seeing to his hands, but he shrugged her off and grabbed a tin from the back of a cabinet under the sink, emptying water from the kettle into it before bringing it into the living room. “Fifteen minute soak and they’ll be brand new, promise,” he said, sticking his hands in the tin and hissing slightly.

Raven waited. Wesley glanced up at her, snorted, and looked away.

“Don’t know, exactly,” he said, after a pause. “Charles went looking for his Dad’s friends, and they weren’t what he expected. He needed me to sort it all out. So I did. And now I’m here.”

“What, forever?” Raven objected. And then she faltered, and clarified, “He still needs you?”

“I think he prefers it to remembering a lot of the shit we went through,” Wesley replied. He sounded petulant. “So I get to carry that around. I don’t really mind anymore, though. Helps with my work.”

“Your work?” Raven echoed, even though she suspected with dread that she already knew.

He smiled. “Just cleaning up other people’s messes now. Nothing they don’t deserve.”

***

One week in, Charles excuses himself from the dinner table citing exhaustion and then emerges from his bedroom fifteen minutes later wearing different clothes. 

“Charles? Where are you going?” Raven asks pointedly, as he passes through the kitchen. Erik pauses with his cup of tea halfway to his mouth, interested in the answer.

He pauses. “Training,” he says briefly. “Don’t wait up.”

Alex frowns. “Didn’t he just—”

“Sometimes he can’t sleep, so he needs to blow off steam,” Raven cuts in smoothly, though her hands twitch. “Don’t worry about it.”

Erik watches Charles as he walked away. Raven notices, and says again, more sharply, “Don’t worry about it.”

He glares at her. She doesn’t budge.

It's easy to tell that the Westchester mansion is full of history and secrets. Erik begins to include Charles as one of them.

***

She got used to it over the years, because she didn’t have any choice in the matter.

Wesley wasn’t actually horrible, which helped, and he could talk about their earlier lives, with Kurt and Sharon, which she couldn’t do with Charles anymore.

“This can’t be healthy,” she said at one point, watching him meticulously clean Brian Xavier’s sniper rifle until its wooden grips were bright with linseed oil and the intricate carvings on its barrel stood out in polished relief.

“What? Killing bad guys or divvying up one guy’s memories and skills between two people?” Wesley said, not taking his eyes off the front sight.

“Both?” Raven offered.

“Raven,” he said, setting down his pipe cleaner, “Do you really want Charles to want to do the shit I do, remember the shit I remember?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

“Didn’t think so.” With deft hands, he packed the rifle into a dark duffel bag and stood. He brushed a kiss to her temple as he walked out the door.

“Get some sleep. He’ll be here in the morning.”

***

Erik finds, against his will, that he is enjoying himself. The mansion remains almost repellent in its conspicuous consumption, but the children that occupy it make it more accessible, and Charles himself is so simultaneously forgetful of, and apologetic for his affluence that comfort creeps in without Erik’s notice or permission.

He becomes accustomed to Sean’s supersonic outbursts and Hank’s frenetic technological genius. He manages to hold conversations with Alex and Raven that are, he supposes, _friendly_. 

And then, of course, there’s Charles. Charles, who spent their drives across the country quizzing him on the exact proportions of iron and carbon in the steel components of their engine, who plays chess like a tethered demon, all tricks and counter-attacks and ruthlessness, who at the same time preaches tolerance with an impossible sort of naïve fearlessness and conviction.

Charles, who disappeared one night while they were in Chicago, and had shown up the next morning looking like death but smiling like he’d never slept better in his life.

Erik hadn’t pressed at the time—he has his own agenda, it’s hardly fair that he question whether Charles does as well—but now he wonders at that absent night, and at Raven’s strange anxiety, and the restlessness he now sees in a man he reluctantly considers a friend.

Charles _is_ restless, he can tell. He keeps it well hidden, pouring his energy into helping his charges, his gestures sharp and expansive and just a touch too familiar, like there is something practiced in them that isn’t the product of natural repetition, but of training. And then he walks away, claiming that he’s going to take a nap, but he rarely stays in his room for longer than it takes to change clothes and retreat to another part of the house. Erik considers following him, but Raven seems to always be there with assurances and distractions, and so he stops himself.

But then some time later, out of nowhere, Raven asks him, “Have you met him yet?” 

Erik barely keeps himself from startling. It's well past midnight, and she has found him standing outside on the patio off the east wing, where he had gone to get away from the ridiculous opulence of the indoors. He holds a glass of scotch loosely in one hand, which he sets down on the stone wall before turning.

He frowns at her. “Who?”

“I knew it was going to get worse once we got here,” she says, nonsensically. “It’s this damned house.”

“I don’t understand,” he says slowly.

She nods, as if that was answer enough. “Well, if you ever do, don’t tell Charles,” she says. “It’s important that he doesn’t know.”

He begins to lose patience. “What _are_ you talking about?”

“Charles is a good person,” she continues, ignoring him and looking steadily at her hands. “He might be frustrating and old-fashioned about some things, but he’s a good man, and if you want him to stay that way, you won’t tell him about Wesley.”

She turns abruptly and shuts the patio door behind her. Erik stares after her.

“Who is Wesley?” he demands.

The door offers no answers.

 _She’s right about one thing,_ he thinks. _There is something about this house. Or something about Charles._

Or both.

***

Wesley saved Raven's life, once.

They don’t talk about it.

Raven had seen and experienced a lot of amazing things in her life. But it would take her many years to shake the memory of Wesley firing his .45 into her face, and having the bullet strike the mugger behind her straight through the temple.

“Physics,” he’d said, watching her tremble and stumble away from the corpse that had, seconds ago, been holding a knife to her throat, “Is my bitch.”

She slapped him hard across the face and walked away.

Weeks later, she said, “You could have told me.”

And he replied, “You didn’t want to know.”

***

(Unbeknownst to Raven, Charles sometimes has his suspicions.

He knows that he’d never been a clumsy drunk until he got to Oxford. He also knows that he’s never, paradoxically, been as coordinated while sober since. A waitress at a pub near Balliol had stumbled once in his second year, nearly spilling glassware everywhere, and he caught three of the five glasses before they hit the floor.

She had looked at him like he was some sort of freak.

He’d itched for a pill bottle he didn’t have.

There are further clues in the way he wakes up sometimes with wax under his fingernails, and the way his muscles ache in ways he knows are impossible to acquire from the laps around the mansion that he takes in the mornings. There are locked rooms in the house that he never enters but which have new grease and polish on their door handles, and even more recently, there are times that Hank and Alex mention his insomnia in passing when he had been certain that he had slept soundly the night before.

So yes, he suspects that there is something amiss. But an instinctual part of him, the same part that keeps him from wandering in past those locked doors, holds him back from questioning it.

He has always possessed a strong memory, and an almost frightening degree of self-awareness. When his instincts tell him to turn away, he knows that it’s because, deep down and buried, there are things that he keeps hidden for a reason.)

***

Erik notices the locked rooms. “Do you know what’s behind them?” he asks Raven, after a week of Charles's concentrated restiveness.

He had come out of the library just in time to see Charles pause at one beneath the stairs, fingers almost brushing the latch, before turning away. He spotted Erik a half-second later, and had smiled crookedly before offering, “Chess later?”

Erik had nodded, but saw no sense in trying to hide his doubts. Charles faltered for a moment, no doubt reading his suspicion, but did nothing to assuage it, just turned away to escape down the hall.

Raven shakes her head at him. “No.”

“And you’re not curious?”

“No,” she says, more firmly.

It only makes Erik more certain.

***

Getting used to it did nothing to make it easier.

“Hold this,” Wesley hissed on the morning of Charles's graduation, shoving academic dress on carelessly with one hand while he held out a 9mm in the other.

“Jesus, Wesley, it couldn’t have waited?” Raven said, snatching it out of his grip and stowing it in her purse.

“You know me. Not one for waiting.” He winked, and suddenly his whole demeanour changed.

“Raven, you look nervous. I’m the one who has to get up in front of all these people,” Charles said. He looked around bemusedly, smoothing his robe down in distraction. “And to think that I nearly slept through my own damned ceremony.”

She exhaled. “I always tell you to set two alarms, but you never listen.”

“I always listen,” he protested, “I just don’t always choose to take your advice.”

She swatted him across the shoulder, and he dodged, laughing, and kissed her cheek before running to catch up with the assembled graduates. She watched him go with a sour feeling in her stomach.

The gun felt like a two-ton weight against her shoulder. She dragged it with her to her seat.

***

On the day that Erik hands Charles a gun and says, “Shoot me,” Charles falters.

Erik feels more than sees the way the gun wavers in his hand. “Come on,” he says, “I can deflect it, you know I can.”

If anything, the gun wavers more. “Charles,” he starts.

The gun goes still. For a moment, Erik is absolutely certain that Charles is going to fire.

But then he’s flicking the safety back on.

“I’ve got a better idea,” he says.

And then, just like that, Erik is moving satellites.

Through vision blurred with tears, he has the stray thought that maybe he doesn’t care about what secrets Charles keeps, because this— _this_ —is worth any sins or omissions between them. To remember a time when he wasn’t angry is worth it.

But then Moira is shouting out the window about Kennedy and the Russians, and Charles turns away from him to head inside. His hand falls briefly on Erik’s shoulder, and then—

Erik freezes. Charles's hand slides off his shoulder, a casual touch, but one Charles has only given to him once before.

It’s as if Charles has accidentally knocked loose some other, extra memories that were unearthed in his search for that single pure one.

They ring clear in Erik’s mind, and he cannot breathe.

_”Hey, let’s go. Frost is through there, and as far as I can tell all of the guards are down for the fucking count.”_

_“Charles?”_

_“Huh? Oh, yeah. Come on, what’re you looking at?”_

“Erik? Are you coming? The president is about to speak.”

He blinks, focuses on Charles, who looks the same; still flush with victory and waiting impatiently for Erik to catch up.

“I’ll be right there,” he says.

Charles nods, bemused, and goes ahead.

Erik leans back against the wall, unsure of whether his legs will otherwise hold him.

***

The night before flying out to Washington, there was a knock on Raven’s door at the hotel where the CIA was putting them up.

It only took one glance for Raven to identify who she opened the door to nowadays. “Wesley? What do you want?”

“Can I come in?” he asked.

She nodded and stepped back.

He was armed, as usual, though not as heavily as when he went out. Just a Browning Hi-Power at his belt, and a backup at his ankle. He surveyed the room like he was familiarising himself with its weak points. Raven knew he probably was. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, “About what you and Charles are getting yourselves into.”

“Believe me, I have my doubts about it,” Raven replied. “But what does it matter to you?”

He looked at her impatiently. “Look, I don’t do my job for shits and giggles. I do it to help people. And I respect that about Charles too, okay? Like, I get that that’s what he’s trying to do with all this. But you and Erik both know that this is a really fucking dangerous gamble we’re all taking. And just wanted to tell you that I’m not going to sit back and let any of you get hurt, not at any cost, even the ones Charles isn’t willing to pay.”

Raven bit her lip. “I don’t know whether that makes me feel better or worse.”

“Either way,” Wesley shrugged, “I’ll do what’s necessary. I know Charles is precious to you, but if he doesn’t step up, then don’t be surprised if I do.”

***

Chess is a tense affair, and not just because they are going into battle tomorrow.

“What is so interesting about me that your eyes aren’t on the board, my friend?” Charles says eventually.

Erik sips his martini. “Surely you’re capable of answering that question yourself.”

“Knowing the answer and knowing the why’s and how’s of it are very different.” He looks up finally and smiles. “What’s on your mind, Erik?”

Erik watches him. “Russia.”

Charles's expression falters. “What about Russia?” he says.

“How did you get past the guards?”

“The usual.” Charles flutters his fingers next to his head. “Jiggery-pokery.”

Erik says lightly, “You’re lying. You don’t even know which guards I’m talking about.”

Charles raises an eyebrow. “Reading minds is my trick, not yours, you know.”

“I do know,” Erik agrees. “But you see, I don’t have to mind-read to remember very clearly what I saw when we came back out of the compound.”

Charles is very still.

“Between your ‘jiggery-pokery’ and my blunt force, there shouldn’t have been too many shots fired. And yet I saw quite a few men down with bullets in their chests.” He moves a rook forward. “Last time I checked, you were barely comfortable holding a gun, let alone firing one.

“So tell me, Charles. How did you get past those guards?”

***

(Wesley keeps a whole mess of keys to the Westchester mansion that neither Kurt nor Cain had ever managed to find. Mostly because before they were in Wesley’s possession, they were in a seedy apartment in Chicago that once belonged to Brian Xavier.

He keeps a set of keys to Charles's mind, as well.

Those he sometimes gets careless with.

After all, it isn’t his problem that Charles decided to pussy out on his family history.)

***

Russia had been a very, very near disaster. Charles remembers that.

He remembers hiding Erik and the CIA task force in plain sight, and he remembers borrowing a guard’s sight and knowledge for the sake of intel.

He remembers Erik breaking cover, and he remembers going after him.

And then there is a…gap.

He tries working backwards. The encounter with Emma Frost, whom they’d gotten to when Charles had caught up to Erik in the compound, which he’d been able to do by…

Panic flares in his chest. He looks at Erik. “I didn’t—”

And then, abruptly, everything smoothes into blank, calm unawareness.

***

Wesley drops one of the keys in his haste.

***

“Charles didn’t. I did.”

Erik freezes. Charles's frame, locked in fear moments ago, has relaxed into an insolent sprawl on the couch. He looks very much the same, but also entirely different, like a puzzle assembled wrongly. And for all that Charles frustrates him with his evasiveness and intrusive privilege, this new creature instills in Erik a sudden and unexpected flare of distaste, and a longing for Charles to come back, and fill his skin as he ought.

After a long moment, Erik inhales and says, “You’re Wesley, I take it?”

Wesley—wearing the same doe eyes and expressive mouth, but with an air of having been beaten down into something dense and unyielding—says, “Yeah. That’s me.”

There’s a blur of movement, and in the next moment the sharpened point of an iron poker from the fireplace is inches from Wesley’s eye, and Wesley himself is gripping the handle of it.

Erik blinks slowly, and the iron poker quivers. “Good reflexes,” he says. "Better than Charles's."

“You have no idea,” Wesley replies. “You want to get this thing out of my face?”

“Not particularly,” Erik says, eyes narrowed. “Who are you, and why are you in Charles's body?”

Wesley quirks his lips. “Didn’t you get the memo? I’m no one. I only exist because I have to.”

“I don’t understand.”

Wesley tests the poker’s strength. Erik doesn’t let it budge. “You don’t want Charles doing what I can do,” he says.

“And what do you do?” Erik asks, curling his lip. “More mind tricks?”

Wesley’s laugh is more like a bark. “I can outrun Hank,” he says, voice flat and body coiled. “I’m good with knives, and I’m an artist with guns. My father was the greatest assassin who ever lived, and I have it on good authority that I’m better.” He considers the poker, and sits back. “Does that answer your question?”

“I’m good with guns too,” Erik says mildly.

Wesley cuts him a sharp half-grin, lip curling. “I know. I bought a set of ceramic knives just for you.”

Erik feels his demeanour cool. “You think I’m a threat to you?”

“I know you’re a threat to me. And you’re a threat to Charles,” Wesley retorts.

“I would never hurt Charles!” he snarls. The poker wavers.

“Then what the fuck is this?” Wesley yanks the poker out of the air and throws it to the side with a clatter. “You kill me, you kill him. That's the deal.”

“We are on the eve of war,” Erik says icily. “And I want to know why my friend has been hiding you from me.”

“He’s not hiding jack shit. He _doesn’t fucking know_. And I’d appreciate it if that continued.” He stands up, and Erik matches him, towering over him; but for once, Charles's smaller frame doesn’t look small at all.

Wesley pauses.

“Oh, and before I go.” He steps forward, and then his lips are on Erik’s.

Erik receives the kiss like a slap in the face—it’s savage and longing and unbearably thorough, for all that it’s brief.

Wesley pulls away with a scrape of teeth, and watches him with impatience and a maybe touch of Charles's admiration. “He’s afraid of ruining your friendship,” he says. “I think he doesn’t give you nearly enough credit. Mutant and proud, right? That counts for more than just special abilities.”

He turns away, but Erik recovers fast and seizes his wrist. “You do what’s necessary,” he says, studying him carefully. “Will you help me kill Shaw?”

Wesley looks back at him. “Pretty sure my abilities won’t help any. But I won’t stop you. Charles might try.”

“Shaw _deserves_ to die.”

“Hey, no arguments here. I think Charles might even agree with you. But that isn’t the point. The point is where you stop after that.”

“I’ll stop when we’re safe.”

“And that’s fucking worrisome.” He twists his arm out of Erik’s grip. “You might think you’re a superior being, but you’re not god; you don’t get to choose who lives and dies. Believe me, I knew someone else who thought so.”

He kisses Erik again, this time just on the corner of his mouth. “So be good. I’m going to bed. Charles might come down later, or he might not. You both need the sleep, after all. Big day, you know.”

He claps Erik on the shoulder, and leaves the room.

Erik pauses, and then sits back down on the sofa. With a thought, he directs the poker back to its stand next to the fireplace.

He regards the chess match that Charles had abandoned. He moves a knight.

“Check,” he murmurs.

His lips are still tingling when he goes finally to bed.

***

For the first time in nearly a decade, the door beneath the stairs (and in the attic, and in the tertiary guest bedroom) is left unlocked.

Wesley tries not to think of his life in metaphors, but really, the Westchester mansion is a damned good one.

***

Charles is the one Erik finds making breakfast in the morning. He cocks an eyebrow at him as he enters the kitchen. “Good morning,” he says. “Big day.”

Erik thinks of the hard pressure of Wesley’s mouth on his own. “Indeed,” he says.

“The children aren’t up yet, but I thought that perhaps we could do a bit better than cereal before we all go risk our lives.”

“Fighting on a full stomach isn’t a good idea,” Erik replies absently.

“Are you all right, my friend?” Charles says, taking his eyes off of the eggs in the pan. “You seem distracted again.”

“I’m fine,” Erik says, too quickly. He sorts through his thoughts. “I…this is important to me.”

“I know.” Charles touches his arm diffidently. “We’re going to stop him.”

“I’m going to kill him, Charles,” he says, keeping himself still. “You must know that.”

Charles sighs. “I wish that wasn’t something you needed so desperately.”

“You think I want to feel this way?”

“I don’t know, Erik.” He runs a hand through his hair, shoving it into even greater disarray. “Sometimes I wonder.”

Erik stares at him. “I am what I have been made into,” he says, after a pause. “I can't change that.”

“The first thing we can _always_ change,” Charles says, quiet but vehement, “Is ourselves.”

Erik exhales. Charles would know, wouldn’t he?

Or not, as the case may be.

Charles gave him one finally worried look before turning greet the rest of the team as they came downstairs.

***

Wesley has memories of a life he’s only half led.

For the most part, he’s only a little bitter about it. He’s sort of relieved, in a way—he only has the memories, not the experiences, of an early life which, after Brian Xavier had died, hadn’t exactly been a happy one.

Sometimes, though, when he thinks of that summer in Chicago (and Moravia, and then Chicago again) he entertains the thought of what it would be like to be more than half a person.

But then he always comes back to the same conclusion: that it’s better to be a capable fragment than a broken whole.

***

Cuba, though.

Cuba is panic.

Their first encounter with Shaw may have made the children into adults, but this is asking them to be soldiers, and they are only barely so.

Charles does his best to lead, to utilise their strengths, but soon the plane is crashing, crashing, and he has the most incongruous thought—

— _should have killed the Frost bitch when I had the chance_ —

—before everything is overwhelmed by _impact_ , the plane and submarine both going down in a dizzying mess of rolling shrapnel, and Erik is there, pinning him to the side, keeping them all safe, keeping Charles safe.

When the world stops spinning, Erik releases him carefully, and meets his gaze with a strange sort of care.

“You’ll guide me inside the sub?” he says.

“I’ll be with you the whole time,” Charles promises, and doesn’t know what to make of the minute flare of doubt that he receives from Erik's mind before he exits the wreckage of the plane.

He doesn’t have time to think about it, though. Shaw’s team is regrouping, and from what Charles can see of the ships on the horizon, they’re all running out of time.

He forces himself to filter out the distractions of war, and raises his fingers to his temple.

As the children run out onto the battlefield, Charles sees through Erik’s eyes.

The control room, the hallway, the lounge. The black hole of absence just behind the wall that suddenly

opens,

crystalline,

revealing Shaw, incandescent with more than rage.

Erik moves forward like a moth drawn to flame.

“Erik,” Shaw says, mouth twisting beneath his helmet. “How nice to see you again.”

And then Charles is privy to the wash of Erik’s pain and desperation and loathing and then—

A void.

Charles waits, heart pounding. Receives a crackle of transmission from Erik, etched with fear. He calls out,  _There! Whatever you’re doing, Erik, keeping doing it, I can almost hear you!_

He receives a flash of incredulity in return but ignores it, focusing on reaching through, waiting for Shaw’s mind to become visible to him—

There.

The helmet lifts, and he’s sliding inside, seizing control of this new mind, and then—

Cold, alien certainty. Charles feels it wash across Erik’s consciousness and then there is suddenly nothing, nothing at all.

He looks at Erik through Shaw. Sees his expression beneath the metal and doesn’t need to read his mind to know what’s going to happen.

In a flare of panic, he slams his hand against the broken hull of the plane, against the clenched and terrified borders of Shaw’s distorted mind. “Erik! _Don’t—!”_

He isn’t heard.

***

Shaw _screams_.

The coin is like detonator cord, burning a path of white-hot embers that burst out and set his mind on fire. It moves through Shaw’s cranium, severing nerve endings and cauterising neurons into lifelessness, leaving black ash and carbon in their wake.

In Charles's head, it sets locked doors ablaze.

***

There is something deep and dark and satisfying about slow and inevitable death.

Erik watches the coin disappear, and thinks, _This is as close as I will get to peace._

The coin clatters to the ground, etched with blood, and Erik moves to lift Shaw’s empty shell into a new and brighter world.

***

When they were little and still living in Westchester, Raven used to always love how big the house was. It was splendid for hide and seek, even better for make-believe, and when she and Charles did those things he loved it too.

When he was without her, though, she knew that he hated it. The rooms were too big and too lonely and cold from bad insulation and parental indifference.

She had thought back then, with her child’s mind, that that was the reason why, for the first and only time, Charles had lost his temper with Kurt.

“Don’t!”

Kurt had looked at down at Charles like he’d gone mad. “Don’t what, lad?”

“Don’t go in there. That’s Dad’s room.”

Kurt sneered. “Not anymore. It’s my house now, isn’t it.”

Charles growled, his young face blotched red with anger. “That isn’t. _That_ is my father’s room. _Don’t open it.”_

And Kurt had staggered back, looking scared and angry for only a moment before slipping into frightening, artificial indifference and walking stiffly away like his legs didn’t belong to him.

Charles had watched him until he’d turned down the corridor before his shoulders slumped and he’d caught Raven watching from an alcove. He looked anxiously at her. “He can’t have it,” he said, as if that explained it. “That room’s not for him.”

Raven had nodded like she understood. It scared her, what Charles could do, but Kurt was a bully, and it didn’t scare her that what he could do, he did to Kurt. She thought that perhaps Charles had wanted to keep the house from feeling any bigger than it already did. It seemed sensible, to just not open as many rooms as there were.

It was soon after that that Kurt became crueler and Sharon sicker, but no matter how many bruises showed up on Charles’s wrists and stomach, he never let that room go unlocked.

“It’s my father’s room,” he said, every time.

When she brought it up after Oxford, however, he couldn’t remember a thing about it. And when she asked _Wesley?_

Well.

“It’s Brian’s room,” he said. He paused. “And now it’s mine.”

***

Erik speaks like a man possessed, but the thing that scares Charles more than anything in the world is that the thing that possesses Erik is _belief_.

Charles throws himself at him, and the missiles halt in the air, but already he knows that it’s not enough. Erik hurls him to the ground, and though the blows barely register after experiencing Shaw’s death, they’re nothing—they’re not enough.

The bombs bear down on their makers.

Erik wields them like a vengeful god.

Groaning on the ground, head still ablaze from the wreckage of Shaw’s mind, Charles thinks in fragments: _I don’t know if I can do this._

***

And a voice he only half-recognises answers, a whisper from behind crumbling doors.

 _Then let me_.

***

Raven doesn’t know what to do.

Charles is crumpled on the ground, but Erik is making _sense_.

She doesn’t know what to do.

Moira is reaching for her gun.

“Raven.”

Oh god.

She breathes, “Wesley?”

Alex and Sean are staring at them now. “Who—?” Alex starts.

It’s in the set of his shoulders against the sand, in the tight chill of his mouth, so familiar now and yet still so unsettling.

“Give me your gun,” Wesley says, in a quick, furious monotone.

“No,” she protests. “You can’t shoot him!”

Wesley doesn’t even react, just shifts his focus. “Sean, isn’t it? Give me your gun.”

Sean shoots a look at Erik, and obeys.

Moira opens fire.

***

So does Wesley.

***

Erik deflects Moira’s bullets with a flick of his wrist, and he is so, so angry; so angry that it feels like a sickness. So _disappointed_ it nearly deafens him, blinds him.

Blinds him to the last shot.

He feels the metal of it a second too late, and even if he’d known sooner he wouldn’t have known how to stop it because it isn’t following the rules, its trajectory absurd—

It catches the bottom of the helmet on a curve and knocks it loose.

Moira’s last bullet flies out into the water, unnoticed.

***

Charles’s mind is a flood.

_FIREfearforgivenesscoincoldwaterwaxtrustmindsriflesregretfibers_

The bombs are dropping into the sea, too quickly for him to regain control. Erik stumbles, reaches for the helmet.

Another parabolic, impossible bullet flicks it out of reach.

“Erik,” Charles says, all quiet intensity. “I can’t let you do this.”

_loomsfatherKurtcarsmeatfearnofearthreadsFoxmotherfatelockeddoors_

No, _Wesley’s_ mind.

But that should be impossible.

He gathers his wits as best he can. “Don't you understand? They will keep fearing us, they will keep killing us!”

“And our first priority must _always_ be to defend ourselves,” Wesley snaps. 

“We start to choose who lives and dies by our hands, and we are no longer the better men, we are the monsters,” Charles says, sounding ragged and exhausted.

“If it keeps us safe—” Erik begins, head spinning.

“It will not,” Charles whispers.

“It’ll paint targets on our fucking heads,” Wesley adds loudly.

“I’m not talking to you,” Erik growls, catching on. “You’re a damned hypocrite, talking of hiding when Charles doesn’t even know you’re there—”

“Erik, don’t—,” Raven starts.

“You _know_ the necessity of taking lives, and yet you shield him from himself?” Erik demands.

“Who do you think hid me in the first place?” Wesley snarls, but there’s something flickering in his eyes, now, something confused and familiar. “Charles might be a hypocrite, but so are you! Look at what you're doing!” He sweeps an arm out. “All of those people! Snuffed out because they didn’t understand, didn’t get a chance to understand! _You don’t get to choose._ You don’t—”

He breaks off suddenly, gun falling from his hands.

Erik is swept up in the flood again.

_fearforgivenesscoldwaterwaxmindsriflesregretfibersdoorsburningdoorsBURNINGDOORS_

A single moment etches itself into the ashes across the shared space of their connected minds: A bright coin carving through brain matter like a hot knife through butter.

Erik can’t breathe. “Charles,” he says blankly.

***

The hinges have nothing left to hold up. Amid splinters, they melt into the ground.

***

Charles is holding his head in his hands, fingers trembling at his temples. He's muttering, mostly too fast for Erik to understand, but what he catches makes the shock and panic rise in his chest even further.

“No, no you’re right, no more lies, no more locks, I can’t,” Charles looks up at him, and it _is_ Charles, not Wesley, but he looks totally unlike how Erik has ever seen him before. His eyes are red and wide. He gasps, and then chokes, “It _hurts,_ Erik.”

And that’s all it takes.

 _“Scheiße_.” Erik runs forward, and catches him as he crumples.

Raven is at his side almost as fast, the rest of the team hovering in confusion. “Charles!” she grabs his hand and shoves it onto her face. “Charles, focus.”

He grimaces. “I promised I’d never—”

“Free pass, good for one time only,” she said tersely. “Use it, or I’m never speaking to you again.”

He huffs, but slowly his expression relaxes minutely, and Erik can feel the tension drain out of his shoulders. He adjusts his grip to support Charles’s crumpled figure.

“What are you doing?” he asks Raven.

“Giving him space,” she answers, watching her brother intently. “We used to do it when we were small and had to go to the city. If he got too overwhelmed, he hid in my head for a little while to get some distance until he could get back in control. And what you just did,” she added, shooting him a glare, “Was a hell of a lot worse than a city full of minds.”

“I’m not going to apologise for making him accept himself,” Erik replies.

She makes a disgusted sound.

They listen to Charles as he breathes. Raven murmurs, snippets of old songs, children’s stories. Erik waits, feelings his legs cramp under the weight of Charles’s shoulders, and not caring.

After a time, there is movement above their heads; Erik looks up to find Azazel standing over them.

Alex lunges forward, but Sean holds him back.

“Yes?” Erik says levelly.

Azazel observes him for a moment. “We owe you a debt.”

“How so?”

He jerks his head in the direction of the battleships that had turned tail towards their respective countries of origin.

“I was saving myself as much as anyone else,” Erik says. “You owe me nothing.”

“Lehnsherr. We are none of us safe here, your friend is injured, and I can provide transport. Take my offer, it will make us even.”

“Come to the mansion with us,” Charles says suddenly, startling them all. He looks pale, but mostly lucid. “At least until you are sure of your next plans. You are without a leader—we can provide a place for you to regroup, if nothing else.”

“Professor?” Hank says, incredulous.

“That really doesn’t sound like a good plan,” Alex comments.

“Charles, I really can’t allow that,” Moira steps in. She’s holstered her gun, but her hand is still on it. “They’re known terrorists who nearly—”

“Sleep,” Charles commands, sounding like Wesley for a moment, and she collapses. “Forget,” he says, softer, and then he raises his hand to his temple. He looks back up at Erik after a moment. “One of the ships will come and pick her up,” he says.

“That was ruthless,” Erik observes.

“It was that or lose them,” Charles nods vaguely at Riptide and Azazel. “With some misgivings, I think I’m willing to value association with them over the CIA. They're not like Shaw, I can see it.”

“You’re learning.”

“I’m remembering,” Charles corrects, but he doesn’t look happy about it. There’s a bitter turn to his mouth that Erik irrationally wants to smooth away. He clears his throat.

“Westchester, then. You’re certain?” he says, after a moment.

Charles nods, looking at where Erik’s hand rests on his chest. “I am capable of change,” he murmurs. “Everyone is. Are you?”

Erik shakes his head. “You’re insane.”

“Most psychologists would agree, apparently,” Charles nods, grinning slightly. Then he winces. “Raven, may I…?”

“Yeah, yeah.” She lifts his hand back onto her head. He exhales and goes quiet again.

Azazel cocks his head. “Was his offer genuine?”

“I guess so,” Erik says dryly. “We seem to have inadvertently reached ceasefire anyway.”

“Charles has that effect,” Raven comments. Then she grimaces, “At least, he did.”

Azazel looks over his shoulder at Riptide, who had watched the scene in silence. Now, he inclines his head slightly. Azazel turns back. “We will go to your mansion,” he says. “I will need coordinates, or a very clear description.”

“Here,” Raven offers her hand. “Charles is with me for the moment, he can send you a picture.”

Azazel takes her hand, blinks, and then nods. Grudgingly, the rest of the groups converge.

Angel is the last to come forward. She holds her injured wing folded back defensively, and she eyes the group like she is unsure of her welcome.

To everyone’s surprise, Hank sighs, and holds out his free hand. “Come on,” he says, “Charles’s house is pretty cool, you should see it.”

She bites her lip, and nods, putting her hand in his.

Azazel surveys them all, and then whisks them out of sight.

***

They arrive in Westchester, and Charles promptly announces via Raven that he is going to sleep, that newcomers are welcome to choose their rooms, and that should there be any fighting while he is asleep he will be _very put out_.

Erik can’t entirely believe just how effective those instructions prove to be.

Azazel and Riptide wander curiously through the east wing, no doubt fascinated by the display of old wealth when Shaw had been so nouveau riche, while Angel tentatively follows Hank down to the lab so that he can take a look at her wing.

Sean announces that he’s starving and going to go raid the fridge, and Alex elects to join him after no doubt assessing that this was the lesser of a plethora of evils.

Erik stands in the foyer, breathing shallowly, and then goes to the study, where he pours himself a drink and then sits, staring at the abandoned chess game from the night before.

That evening feels like it was years ago.

Erik had been so sure that he would never come back to it.

Raven finds him an hour later, and confirms that Charles is out like a light and will probably continue to sleep until his mind finishes repairing its schism. She curls into Charles’s armchair and observes Erik quietly.

“You were going to leave today,” she says eventually.

“I was,” he agrees.

“I would have gone with you.”

He looks up at that. She is impassive in her natural, blue skin. She has a dressing gown pulled around her, and she looks comfortable.

“Even if that meant leaving Charles behind?”

She nods. “I was starting to prefer Wesley to him, and when I realised that, I thought that maybe I shouldn’t stick with him anymore. It was getting too hard.”

“And now?” Erik asks, curious.

“We had a long talk, while he was with me.” She taps her temple. “It was…it was good. Now that he remembers everything Wesley did, what happened when we were little and everything else, he understands a lot more and it’s just...better. We’re better.”

“So now you want to stay.”

“I want all of us to stay,” she corrects gently. She fiddles with a fraying edge of upholstery. “We could try this again. We can do better.”

“While continuing to hide.” Erik can’t entirely mask his skepticism.

“Wesley had a point, though,” Raven says. “If we went off, trying to take down the CIA and whatever else got in our way, we’d have to hide then, too. It would just be a different type of hiding.”

He waves it away. “Hiding our footsteps, not our intentions or our identities.”

“It’s still hiding,” she says sharply. Her mouth twists. “I’m tired of hiding too, you know. I want to be me so much that I want to shove it down people’s throats and make them like it. But I can’t make them like it by scaring them. Do you see?”

Erik looks away.

She taps her foot twice against the armchair, and then leaves him alone in the room.

***

Several hours, and more than a few drinks later, Erik rises from his seat and makes his way to his room.

Except that somehow, he ends up at Charles’s door instead.

He grimaces at himself, and makes the lock silent as it unlatches for him.

Charles looks particularly small in the expanse of the bed, pillows stacked haphazardly around his head, bedclothes swamping him.

Erik thinks about what Raven had said. _Now he remembers everything Wesley did_ …

He wonders.

“Come here, please.”

“You’re supposed to be sleeping for the next decade.”

“Raven has a flair for the dramatic.”

Erik steps towards the bed. Charles gives him a smirk that is pure _Wesley_ and pats the mattress.

Erik huffs, and sinks slowly onto the edge. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Discombobulated. It is very trying to reintegrate memories one has kept suppressed for nearly ten years.”

“What about more recent ones?”

Charles wrinkles his nose. “Worse. Apparently Wesley once blew up an entire factory using rats and peanut butter.”

“Sounds ingenious.”

“I am quite clever, you know. But it was also rather messy.”

“You can’t just blame Wesley for things you don’t like and then claim you’re clever when he does something interesting.”

“But I am Wesley! At least somewhat.”

“You are only marginally like Wesley,” Erik says, and brushes a lock of hair back from Charles’s face without thinking. Then he withdraws his hand like he’d burned it.

Charles blinks slowly at him. “You were wondering about other more recent memories,” he says, after a second.

“Don’t read my mind.”

“I wasn’t. As I said, I’m very clever.” He sits up, struggling with the sheets for a moment, and Erik is distracted by the pale hollows along Charles’s collarbones. Distracted enough that he misses that Charles is getting out of bed and pulling on a dressing gown.

“Come on. I want to show you something.”

Silently, Erik follows.

Charles pads down the stairs, and then takes an abrupt left at the bottom. From a pocket, he produces a set of keys.

Erik recognises where they are.

Charles unlocks the door beneath the stairs, and steps in. He looks back at Erik. “Are you coming?”

Erik nods.

***

When Charles was very young, Brian Xavier opened the door under the staircase and said, “Come on, lad. It’s time you got acquainted with what you need when you want to protect your family.”

And Charles had looked around and asked questions until his eyes were as big as saucers, and promptly forgot all about it a week later.

Well, mostly forgot.

***

Charles fumbles for a light switch for a moment, and then finds it. It takes a moment for Erik’s eyes to adjust to the brightness. Then he blinks.

“Good lord, Charles. You have an armoury.”

“I have three armouries,” Charles corrects. “Though Wesley prefers this one. He keeps the artillery from Prague here, as well as the various Moravian items he picked up.” He looks at Erik, and he still has awful bags under his eyes and his skin is too pale and tight across his cheeks, but his gaze is laser sharp. “Erik, if it comes to war, we’ll not be unprepared. But there is a difference between fighting a war for peace, and fighting a war to destroy the other side. I am in the business of the former, not the latter. And I’d like you with me for it.”

Erik looks around at the rows of long-range sniper rifles, and the racks of bowie knives and semi-automatic handguns. He thinks of the coin that killed the man he hated and almost killed the man he’s terrified to suspect he loves. He thinks of his own ideology, one that he knows is powerful in its simplicity and one that he could carry, unaltered, on his shoulders for the rest of his life.

He wonders if there’s room for _this_ in it.

“Is there room for me?” Charles asks, raising an eyebrow. He looks ridiculous in his dressing gown, amidst row upon row of weaponry.

Erik doesn’t even reprimand him for reading his mind. Just pulls him in by the lapels.

Charles smiles against his mouth, and says silently, _Wesley says ‘I told you so.’_

“Wesley can shove it,” Erik replies.

***

Burning doors smoulder in piles of ash and melted locks, but the air that circulates through their empty jambs is cool and clean.

 


End file.
